Theater of the Baroque
Art of the Baroque Period (1600–1750 roughly) in Europe is distinguished by an elaborate, ornate style which, although carefully arranged, ultimately resists order by seeking out the excessive, the grotesque, or the dreamily representational. This applies not merely to the period’s visual art, which is often formally complex and engrossing and is best exemplified by the lush paintings of Reubens and the intense, erotic statues of Bernini, but to other arts of the period as well, and theater in particular. Originating in late Renaissance Italy and spreading through Europe as it developed, Baroque theater engaged the tensions between order and chaos and between reality and illusion by depicting fantastical, martial, or farcical plots undercut with themes of duty, deception, and passion.
The tension between reality and illusion was a particular concern for Baroque playwrights. Many plays of the period—for instance Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Corneille’s L’Illusion Comique—explore the intersections of dreams and real life, presenting high fantasy contrasted with the comfortably-ordered realities of daily life. Even plays without fantasy elements challenge the audience’s understanding of reality, as in Molière’s The Rehearsal at Versailles, which depicts Molière himself and his acting company attempting to rehearse a play. These plays call into question the truthfulness of real life and the individual’s ability to separate fact from fiction, and the playwrights of the period experimented with different ways of dramatizing these questions, perhaps the chief preoccupation of the artists and philosophers of post-Renaissance Europe.
In seventeenth century France, however, these experiments were complicated by a certain need for order, showing itself in the form of dramatic theory and criticism. With the Renaissance rediscovery of the Greek and Roman classics, Aristotle’s Poetics—with modern interpretation and interpolation—had taken hold as the guiding principles for dramatic structure. Plays were expected to fit into Aristotle’s definitions of either comedy or tragedy, and to observe unity of time and place. For example, plays were expected to take place over the course of a day with each act in real time, and occur in the same. Although playwrights like Corneille explored the limits of these rules, blending and bending the rules of comedy and tragedy to create new, expansive genres, or setting aside aspects of the unities in order to tell a broader story, there was a certain amount of pressure during the seventeenth century to adhere to the restrictions.
Much of the pressure to conform came from the newly-founded French Academy, which as of the 1630’s was attempting not only to standardize the French language but to create a national literature as well. Growing out of an informal salon setting, the Academy was officially founded in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu, who was King Louis XII’s chief adviser, and dedicated itself to “labor with all the care and diligence possible, to give exact rules to [the] language, to render it capable of treating the arts and sciences.” Organized to regulate both language and art, as a state-created entity, it held a controlling power over cultural expression. Richelieu in fact commissioned a sort of textbook outlining appropriate dramatic theory; written in 1640 by the Abbe d’Aubingnac, L’practique du theatre provides reflections on the unities, the question of representation and truth, dramatic structure, and spectacle.
Corneille himself notably ran afoul of the Academy with his play Le Cid, which he had subtitled a ‘tragicomedy’ and which disregarded the classical unities. The play fell under a storm of criticism, coming mostly from the Academy. Richelieu himself ordered an analysis, and it was determined that not only Corneille broken theatrical rules, but had written an immoral play. Ashamed of the criticism, Corneille’s plays began to tend more towards classical unity, and the French drama began to cement itself within these boundaries, but the Baroque questions of reality and illusion remained.
–Nick Currie, Dramaturgy Assistant
